Creating and managing community in a community football club

Purpose: To explore the theme of community, a very mobile and contested concept [Delanty (2003). Community. London: Routledge], by looking at how it is understood, made operational and managed at Football Club United of Manchester (FC United), a semi-professional and self-declared community football club in England. Design: FC United was studied ethnographically, through participant observations, interviews and analysis of secondary data. Findings: Results confirm the difficulties in defining community, as well as highlighting the resilience of football communities. Moreover, they show that the utopian goal of creating a sense of community often clashes with the need to manage “community” against set standards, bound by bureaucracy and managerialism, in the (ambitious) attempt to look like an “orgunity” [Parker (2002a). Utopia and Organization. Oxford: Blackwell]. Implications: To maximise the impact of community-making projects, football clubs should favour progressive micro-emancipatory over grand narratives of social change, and exploit the multi-faceted nature of community].